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    Raschke - Para/theology - JCRT 2.1

    Para/theology: The Study of Religion and the Science of the Negative

    Carl A. Raschke
    University of Denver

    “It’s a matter of God.”
    --Jacques Derrida

    Can there be a “science of religion,” as the nineteenth century yearned for?

    Is there indeed a bona fide Religionswissenschaft that compasses and comprehends the whole of what Roman civilization identified as the religiones?

    What would such a “science” of religion involve?

    Can there ever be a “religiology” in the same sense there has been for some time a sociology, or an anthropology, or a psychology?

    Does the subject matter that goes by the name of religio offer itself to the same sort of discursive expansion and methodological execution as the bios of biology?

    If a “religiology” were discernible, how would it actually push forward?

    Contrary to positivist trends in the so-called “social sciences” over the last quarter century, an integral science of religion would require that any theoretical assessment of the religiones be anchored in a formal structure of inquiry, experimentation, and demonstration. Such a formalism has always seemed alien to the study of religion. Ever since Roman classical authors profiled the religiones as “cultic responsibilities,” as dark and termagant mysteries impenetrable to the gaze of reason, the idea of a “scientific” resolution of the issue has remain essentially problematic.[^1]

    Notes

    Carl A. Raschke is professor of religious studies at the University of Denver and senior editor of the Journal for Religious and Cultural Theory. His major books include The End of Theology (The Davies Group, 2000), Fire and Roses: Postmodernity and the Thought of the Body (SUNY 1996), The Engendering God (Westminster Press, 1995), Painted Black (Harper Collins, 1990), Theological Thinking (Scholars Press, 1988). He is the author of over 200 popular and scholarly articles on subjects ranging from postmodern religious thought to computer-mediated education to new religious movements. He is formerly president of the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains Region of the American Academy of Religion and an editor of several series with the American Academy of Religion. He is also a well-known national media personality.

    2000 Carl A. Raschke. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/02.1/raschke/

    [^1] The word religiones was frequently used by the Roman writers to describe the secret ceremonies and guarded mysteries of the Druids. For works that discuss the Roman view of religiones in this manner as shadowy activities that go on in impenetrable woods, see Peter B. Ellis, The Druids (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 58-9. See also Nora Chadwick, The Celts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966).

    [^2] I am of course using the term “deontology” here not in its conventional philosophical manner as a form of ethical reasoning, but in the more literal sense as it sums up the method of deconstruction, that is, as an internal critique of ontological thought.

    [^3] Victor Taylor, Para/Inquiry (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 3.

    [^4] Para/Inquiry, p. 17.

    [^5] Jacques Derrida, “Of An Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 36.

    [^6] “Of An Apocalyptic Tone,” p. 53.

    [^7] Jacques Derrida, “Post-Scriptum,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, p. 289.

    [^8] “Post-Scriptum,” p. 299.

    [^9] Mark Taylor, About Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 40.

    [^10] Mark Taylor, “nO nOt nO”, in Derrida and Negative Theology, p. 175.

    [1] About Religion, pp. 40-1.

    [2] Mark Taylor, “Paralectics,” in Robert P. Scharlemann (ed.), On the Other: Dialogue and/or Dialectics (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1991), p. 29.

    [3] “Paralectics,” p. 30.

    [4] Russ McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

    [5] Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 101-2.

    [6] To Take Place, p. 110.

    [7] To Take Place, p. 105.

    [8] Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 43.

    1. Yet such “scientific” considerations are becoming almost inescapable. In recent years “religious studies” as a field has slowly and unremittingly imploded, largely because ethnographical and taxonomical concerns have replaced any gesture toward general theory. A mounting, pathological suspicion of theory itself has made the development of religious studies as a “discipline” well-nigh impossible. Because theory must of itself be comprehensive, it is routinely disparaged as monolithic and “hegemonic” at a political level. A science of religion would of course demand some kind of ontological commitment. But such a commitment not only shatters against today’s all-pervasive interpretative strategy of difference, it also confronts the postmodern deontology that has come to be known as “deconstructionism” or “radical hermeneutics,” as John Caputo has named it. ↩︎ ↩︎

    2. Is it possible to undertake a “scientific” study of religion that presupposes at the same the “deontological”[^2] method of the postmodern without succumbing to the rage for the anti-theoretical and the vogue of cultural relativism? The task appears formidable, if not futile. Yet there is a “way” open before us that has seemed barred in the past. For the sake of rigor we may describe this way as the via paralogica. ↩︎ ↩︎

    3. Any “religiology”, as we shall see, turns out to be a strange and interesting sort of “paralogy.” What do we mean by the “para/logical,” so far as it touches on a theory of religion? A paralogism is defined in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language as “an argument violating principles of valid reasoning” or “a conclusion reached through such argument.” But this standard definition misses the “deconstructive” role of all paralogies within language itself. The concept of the paralogical pertains to whatever disinhabits the logical. The paralogical is a kind of discursive “catachresis,” inasmuch as it bends and disfigures the syntactical relationships within a textual formation until a whole new semiotic moment arises. More precisely, the paralogical eludes the ratio of all syntactical elements, teasing them beyond their boundaries into the hazy region of “paratheory.” Paratheory, or what Victor Taylor has called “para/inquiry,” ensues from the “disinheritance” of theory. “Linguistic disinheritance is an event in which philosophical and literary meaning are cut off from absolute presence, absolute center.”[^3] ↩︎ ↩︎

    4. Disinheritance is suggested by the Greek prefix para’ itself. The prefix means “beyond,” “aside,” “amiss,” as well as anything connoting “alteration” or “change.” Taylor observes: “‘Para’ is the dangerous prefix which defies the rule of identity, the rule of linkage. ‘Para’ suspends the condensation of the syllogistic rule by first instigating the erring thought and second linking the error to the word or action. The prefix ‘para’ draws attention to the repressed excessiveness of the word ’ its negative instantiation. The paralogical is a logical necessity, just as the paramedic is a medical necessity.”[^4] ↩︎ ↩︎

    5. In what way does the study of religion constitute a form of paralogy? What do we really have in mind when we refer to inquiry into the “religious” as a paralogical venture? From a linguistic standpoint the paralogical emerges out of a vacuation of the metaphysical content of rationality itself. It is the kenosis of the sign. The kenotic sign function is the key to the method of deconstruction. In the deconstructive process the moment of signification is simultaneously a deconstitution of the act of reference. In standard reference theory the dyadic relationship between subject and other, between intention and object, is the architecture for signification. ↩︎ ↩︎

    6. According to the Scholastic dictum, aliquid stat pro aliquid, “something stands for something (else).” But in the movement of deconstruction this bipolar configuration is annulled in one sweep. The aliquid at both ends of the continuum “de-substantializes.” The evanescence of both the referent and the referendum is intimated in both Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology and Derrida’s “marginalization” of predicative discourse. To signify is to dis-seminate, to “sow the seeds” of further signification along the furrow of syntax. The plenitude of signifying presence ’ the Hegelian Begriff ’ is exposed as lack, as lesion. ↩︎ ↩︎

    7. Making this point lyrically, we can say that being is everywhere cracked and fissured. The whole is full of holes. This insight, driven home through Derrida’s post-structuralist revisionism, has become our new postmodernist “Archimedian point,” a point that is actually a promontory jutting out into the stormy ocean. ↩︎ ↩︎

    8. The religiones are this ocean. They are a vast and untenanted sign-space. The sign-space of religion crops up on our “scientific” map as an abyssmal, watery sector. It is where the “topics” ’ or topoi in the cartographic sense ’ of religious theory can be seen as oppositional to the space of inferential discourse, much in the same way that the study of Japanese gardens is attentive not to discrete artifacts and objects, but to the emptiness that suffuses the landscape. ↩︎ ↩︎